Mihaela Belacurencu | ra
Mihaela graduated with a BSc in Psychology in 2022, and with a MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience in 2025. For her Bachelor’s thesis, she investigated implicit learning effects in social processing. For her master’s internship and thesis, she investigated the roles of the nucleus accumbens and the amygdala in Pavlovian-instrumental learning, taking part in a project leveraging fMRI, TUS and computational modelling to disentangle their respective contributions. Following her graduation, she took up a research assistant role in the same lab, where she coordinated a multi-session pharmacological study investigating the effects of serotonin on meta-decision making.
In September 2026, she joined the Motivational and Cognitive Control lab as a research assistant, where she helps Yanfang set up and run an fMRS study investigating prefrontal neurochemical mechanisms of controllability inference. Additionally, she runs computational analyses on existing datasets within the ERC project ChemControl.